The social services sector in Victoria is a multi billion dollar sector providing a range of services with the common focus of reducing poverty and disadvantage experienced by Victorians. The sector employs thousands of Victorians, making a substantial contribution to the state economy. There are a large number of charities and not-for-profit organisations that operate within the social services sector in Victoria, often deriving funding from very different sources than that of their privately-run counterparts.
As the social services sector in Victoria is so large and complex, this report dives into the data to better understand its composition and characteristics. This report and its data visualisations make use of data provided by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) to examine the impact of charities and not-for-profit organisations in the social services sector in Victoria. This report also looks at changes in the nature of the charities and not-for-profits in the social services sector between 2016 and 2017.
The ACNC Data for 2016 was previously accessed and cleaned by VCOSS and provided for analysis. The 2017 ACNC data was sourced and cleaned for this project to match the 2016 data. The ACNC data is self-reported information provided to the ACNC by charities. Please see Appendix 1a for more information on how the data was prepared to VCOSS standards.
The ACNC gave some charities the choice to report their information as a group or a block. These were included in the original data source and were linked to invalid ABN codes. Entries with invalid ABN codes were removed from the data for both 2016 and 2017. For more information on how invalid ABNs can be identified, please see the ABN website. For details on how these criteria were used to identify and remove invalid ABNs from the datasets, please see Appendix 1b. To better understand the structure of the data, click on the tabs below to see truncated excerpts of each year’s dataset.
The below visualisations are all fully interactive; allowing you to focus and reset all of the elements that comprise each plot. Let your curiosity flow; click on legends to remove all other entries, double click legends to remove that individual entry, click and hold to zoom, use sliders to change year, reset and autoscale axes using the fading menu towards the top right.
Charities operating in the social services sector comprise more than one out of every five charities operating in Victoria. In 2016 this was 1,062 charities, which decreased slighty in 2017 to 1,022 (22.8% and 22.0% of total charities, respectively).
In 2016, the largest number of charities were working in the Social Services sector with Other Education recording the second-most number of charities at 1,062. These figures changed in 2017, with Other Education recording the greatest number of charities at 1,136 while Social Services decreased slightly at 1,022 charities.
The total revenue reported by charities to the ACNC each year was very strongly right-skewed. Many charities reported a total revenue of $0, whilst a very small number of big charities recorded total revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The histograms below show the distribution of number of charities for each total revenue bracket for each year before and after a logarithmic transformation.
To better highlight the large skew of the data on total revenue, the below visualisation shows every charity’s total revenue as the diameter of the circle, with each circle colour-coded to the main activity they perform.
A very large reduction in All Other Revenue was reported between 2016 and 2017. This reduction was not found to be re-categorised, or linked to any single main activity; All Other Revenue dropped between 2016 and 2017 across all charities and all sectors.
From 2016 to 2017, the dominant staff type was changed from part-time to full-time. The number of casual staff was the smallest in 2016 and 2017 compared with other staff types. A slight decrease of 4.7% in number of casual employees was seen in the period of 2016 to 2017; from 36,868 to 36,551 respectively. There were changes in the number of part-time employees and the number of full-time employees as well. The number of part-time employees decreased from 67,131 to 63,140 (10.4% drop) and the number of full-time employees increased from 46,516 to 84,849 (15.1% increase).
Social services charities had the largest number of all-type employees as well as full-time and casual type employees in 2016 but in 2017, the largest number of staff were in aged care charities. The number of staff in social services charities accounted for 23.5% of total number of charity staff in 2016 and decreased to 23.4% in 2017. Conversely, the total number of staff in organizations performing aged care activities increased from 20.2% to 24.6%. Other health service delivery charities saw the second largest number of employees and aged care activities had the third largest number of employees, which were 32,574 and 30,418 respectively in 2016. Things changed in 2017 while social services sectors and other education sectors were in the second and third place regarding to numbers of staffs. Income support and maintenance and civic and advocacy activities are seen having the smallest proportions of staffs.
Civic and advocacy activites had the most volunteers in 2016 but had a huge drop from 77403 to 620 in 2017. In 2017, other education sectors got the highest numbers of volunteers. Social services were in the second place in both years and had a slightly decreasing from 75,605 to 70,289 people.
The Social Services sector had the second-highest percentage of charities and not-for-profit organisations running a budget deficit in 2016 (38.2%) as well as in 2017 (39.4%). This is compared to 33.3% of all other charities running a budget deficit in 2016 and 32.1% of all other charities in deficit in 2017.
Compared to other sectors such as International Activities and Other Education, charities performing Social Services receive a relatively low amount of funding for grants and donations to be used in Australia or outside of Australia. Noticeably, the amount of grants and donations for use outside of Australia by Social Services increased from $1,722,865 in 2016 to $24,869,839 in 2017; a 14.4 times increase year on year.
The below visualisations highlight the number of charities running a deficit, surplus, or breaking even in each year. To count as having broken even, the net deficit/surplus for the charity has to equal exactly $0.
See the ABN website for more on how invalid ABNs can be identified.
# Removing Invalid ABNs
## Reference Keybreaker file
ABN_Keybreaker <- read_excel("VCOSS Data/ABN Keybreaker.xlsx")
kable(ABN_Keybreaker,
caption = "ABN Keybreaker") %>%
kable_styling(full_width = FALSE)| Postion | Weighting |
|---|---|
| 1 | 10 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 |
| 5 | 7 |
| 6 | 9 |
| 7 | 11 |
| 8 | 13 |
| 9 | 15 |
| 10 | 17 |
| 11 | 19 |
## Function for checking ABNs
ABN_Checker <- function(ABN_No) {
sumproduct <- c()
for(position in 1:nchar(ABN_No)) {
number <- as.numeric(substr(ABN_No, position, position))
if(position == 1) {
number <- as.numeric(number - 1)
}
product <- (number * ABN_Keybreaker$Weighting[position])
sumproduct <- sum(sumproduct, product)
}
if(sumproduct %% 89 == 0) {
Check <- "Valid ABN"
} else {
Check <- "Invalid ABN"
}
return(Check)
}
ABN_Validator <- function(ABN_vector) {
sapply(ABN_vector, ABN_Checker)
}
VCOSS_ACNC_16 <- mutate(VCOSS_ACNC_16,
ABN_Validation = ABN_Validator(abn))
Invalid_ABNs_16 <- filter(VCOSS_ACNC_16,
ABN_Validation == "Invalid ABN")
VCOSS_ACNC_17 <- mutate(VCOSS_ACNC_17,
ABN_Validation = ABN_Validator(abn))
Invalid_ABNs_17 <- filter(VCOSS_ACNC_17,
ABN_Validation == "Invalid ABN")
## Filter out invalid ABNs from VCOSS dataframes
VCOSS_ACNC_16 <- VCOSS_ACNC_16[which(!(VCOSS_ACNC_16$abn %in% Invalid_ABNs_16$abn)), ]
VCOSS_ACNC_17 <- VCOSS_ACNC_17[which(!(VCOSS_ACNC_17$abn %in% Invalid_ABNs_17$abn)), ]
Social Services and all other Sectors